“US Israel Iran War”

It’s been nearly two weeks since the Trump administration launched a war against Iran, and President Trump is beginning to signal that he wants to wind it down. On Monday, he said “we’re way ahead of schedule,” and that the war would be over “very soon.” On Wednesday during a speech in Kentucky, Trump off-handedly declared “we’ve won,” and said it was all over “in the first hour.”

It’s understandable that Trump would be eyeing a quick end to the war, given spiking oil prices, growing public opposition to the war, and criticism from his MAGA base. But at this point it’s looking less and less like the president will simply be able to declare victory and walk away, however politically desirable that might be.

Ten questions help us discern whether the present war on Iran will be an iteration of previous Middle East conflicts or the start of something much worse

Four years ago, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I recall being asked if it was the beginning of the World War III. Today, two weeks into the latest war on Iran, the same question comes up. It is not foolish to ask.

Unlike World War I, which began in 1914 when all the European empires more or less simultaneously activated their war plans, World War II was in truth a series of regional conflicts that did not converge into a unitary global conflict until the end of 1941. We have seen war break out in eastern Europe in 2022 and then in the Middle East in 2023.

The most recent US-Israeli onslaught on Iran may look to future historians like a staging post to a global conflagration. I stress “may”. Because they may also write about Gulf War III. The better ones may see that this can be understood only in the context of Cold War II. But World War III?

Mojtaba Khamenei was reportedly wounded twice in two separate attacks

France 24 reported that Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, was first wounded during the February 28 attack that killed his father, Ali Khamenei, and then wounded again when the hospital… pic.twitter.com/NW9Imm9BAc

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) March 13, 2026

BREAKING: The Revolutionary Guards headquarters in the Rabat Karim area, near Tehran was destroyed by US-Israeli strikes. pic.twitter.com/eT7tRQOZrQ

— World Source News (@Worldsource24) March 13, 2026

Until last year, for some 46 years, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: always unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, inevitably to be nuclear, self-destructive, and nihilistic.

All that said, was it really ever all that formidable?

Today at a Quds Day march in Tehran, regime supporters pretended to hammer the “final nail in the coffin” of the US and Israel.

Reality: The Iranian Terror Regime is being decimated by the US and Israel. pic.twitter.com/lXvPq255Fo

— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) March 13, 2026

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday morning that Iran’s new supreme leader is “wounded and likely disfigured,” confirming reports that Mojtaba Khamenei was injured early on in the U.S. war against Iran.

“Iran’s leadership is in no better shape, desperate and hiding. They’ve gone underground, cowering. That’s what rats do. We know the new so-called not-so supreme leader is wounded and likely disfigured,” Hegseth told reporters during a press briefing at the Pentagon.

At least five U.S. diplomatic missions have recently been targeted in Iranian retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. With no definitive time frame on the end of the war, embassies are now being targeted beyond the region as well. The latest apparent incident occurred in Toronto, where unknown assailants fired shots at the U.S. consulate early Tuesday — an act the prime minister has condemned as intimidation.

I bet half the regime lives in Canada.

Sometimes the obvious is so obvious that people forget to state it. So let me observe one small footnote among recent obvious things.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and most of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran.

American strategic policy under President Trump has been so imaginative and so professionally executed by the U.S. Armed Forces that the punditocracy, none too blessed with piercing insight the best of times, has generally failed to recognize the proportions of its success. In the 13 months of this second Trump administration, a technique has been devised that has demonstrated it can almost immunize the United States against the depredations of its enemies, who have been subsidizing terrorism and guerrilla warfare to harass and enervate America.

The Iranian elementary school building where scores of children were killed as the U.S. and Israel began their massive aerial campaign was on a U.S. target list and may have been mistaken for a military site, multiple people familiar with the strike told The Washington Post.

The deadly attack occurred in the first few hours of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran — just as parents were hurrying to the two-story schoolhouse to take their kids home to safety — and killed at least 175 people, many of them children, according to Iranian state media.

It is still not clear why the building was hit, but one person familiar with the school strike said the building had been identified as a factory and had been an approved strike target. A second person familiar said there was an arms depot target located in the same area and did not know if the United States hit the school by mistake, or if U.S. officials had the wrong intelligence and thought the building was the arms depot.

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇷 BREAKING:

Multiple media outlets are confirming what Iran's been saying: A U.S. Tomahawk missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab.

Death toll: 165-180, mostly children aged 7-12.

Israel doesn't possess Tomahawk missiles. Only the… https://t.co/6TXhmROkUn pic.twitter.com/EawEZhOnAL

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) March 8, 2026

Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, released his first statement Thursday — after reports circulated that he was in a coma and had his leg amputated after being severely injured in the US-Israeli strikes that killed his father.

The message was read out on Iranian state TV by an anchor as an image of Khameni was displayed.

Two foreign oil tankers carrying Iraqi fuel oil were attacked in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Basra, within Iraq’s territorial waters, causing both vessels to catch fire.

Twenty-five crew members aboard the ships have been evacuated, Iraqi authorities reported. pic.twitter.com/vh1l6rAjf2

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) March 11, 2026

It’s double or quits for the civilised world, for the cause of human flourishing, freedom and democracy. Either Donald Trump holds his nerve, crushes the Iranian regime, rides out the oil shock and reopens the Strait of Hormuz, or he and America are finished, exposed as unserious, fickle and incapable of forward planning, a superpower manquée felled by drone-wielding barbarians.

The challenge is Trump’s character, his willingness to accept short-term economic and electoral pain, not America or Israel’s exceptional military capacities. Does the US president, a hawk on Iran for 47 years, have it in him to finish the job, going down in history as the saviour of civilisation from nuclear Islamism, or is he merely the unidimensional man child his critics believe him to be?

🚨 IRANIAN REGIME PROPAGANDA

New video released by the Iranian regime appears aimed at saber-rattling and spreading fear.

But while Tehran pushes propaganda, its military capabilities are being steadily degraded, as the United States and Israel continue to increase pressure… pic.twitter.com/x8lAMqsGlA

— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) March 10, 2026

The US president’s allies fear he may pull out of the region and leave people to face the aftermath. How will the new ayatollah fare?

When George W Bush prematurely announced an end to the Iraq war in 2003, he was wearing a pilot’s uniform and strutting aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln under banners announcing “mission accomplished”.

It was a less grandiose affair when President Trump declared victory over Iran in his first press conference since launching the joint US-Israeli attacks on February 28. In a ballroom at his golf resort in Florida, he spoke conversationally, but to similar effect.

Update from CENTCOM Commander on Operation Epic Fury: pic.twitter.com/5KQDv0Cfxs

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 11, 2026

The Shi’ite branch of Islam, which has flourished as the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the various ayatollahs for the last half century, believes in the return of the so-called Twelfth Imam, who is descended from Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali ibn Abni Talib. Talib was the fourth caliph assassinated in 661 in a succession war, after which the split between Sunnis and Shi’ites eventually became permanent. According to the traditions of Twelver Shi’ism, the twelfth of these Imams, a boy of five years old, disappeared under mysterious and disputed circumstances in the year 874 – but remained alive. Though communicating with the world through various agents, he entered the state of “occultation” in 941, promising to return when the time would be propitious.

Though the regime’s capabilities to conduct mayhem seem diminished, its efforts persist.

In Tehran back in the spring of 1992, I interviewed Ali Akbar Mohtashami, the hardline cleric who cofounded Hezbollah in Lebanon and helped carry out the devastating suicide car-bomb attacks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. Marines in 1983. I recalled his pride in Iran’s attacks and his vow to continue them until Israel was destroyed, its Jews “sent back to the countries they came from,” and Iran had built its own nuclear bombs. As long as Israel existed and there were revolutionaries in Tehran, he told me, there would be “no Americans in Iran and no peace with America.”

Though Mohtashami died of Covid-19 in 2021, I will never forget his determination, and that of other senior Iranians I interviewed on my trips to Iran, to destroy Israel and humiliate America.